Let not the foot of arrogance come upon me, nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.

There the evildoers lie fallen; they are
thrust down, unable to rise.

Psalm 36

Reflection – The Monday Psalter today
brings us Psalm 36. This is a familiar one to those who pray the breviary,
showing up on Wednesday Week One of Morning Prayer. It is a psalm reflecting
proper biblical dualism—not the false dualism of Gnostic or Manichean mystery
religions where good and evil are two equal and opposing powers in the world,
but true dualism.

This true
dualism is that there is black, and there is white. There is good, and there is
evil. While any one human being may be quite a patchwork of tiny black and
white bits, and the overall effect at a distance is one of grey indistinctness,
the fact is that good is good, evil evil. And that the whole business of life
is to become more and more radiant with the goodness reflecting the goodness of
God, less and less stained by the sorrow and darkness of evil.

We know in
the fullness of Christian revelation that this is the work of grace in us, and
of the Holy Spirit bringing to us the grace of Christ, in which our own efforts
are only a small (if necessary) part. But here and elsewhere in the biblical
revelation the point is to highlight the radical and sharp delineation between what
is good and what is evil.

It is worth
noting in this psalm, however, that the two are sharply delineated, but are not
really parallel. And the difference between them is instructive. The evil one,
the ‘wicked’ in psalmodic parlance, is self-referential, circling back on
himself. Transgression speaks to the wicked… he flatters himself… he sets
himself on a way that is not good. Evil is a closed circle, in its most extreme
form a solipsistic ego project in which no one counts or scarcely exists except
the all-important self.

Good, on the
other hand, is communitarian, relational, other-directed. The psalmist writing
about goodness here first contemplates the goodness of God, not his own
goodness. And he goes on to depict a genuine communion of persons in the next
stanza – the children of mankind taking refuge in the shelter of God’s wings,
feasting and drinking from the table of the Lord, from his fountain of life.

Sin always
locks the person up in his own self; virtue, goodness, right conduct is marked
by definition in its opening the person up to relationship, to communion, to a
whole world that is bigger than himself and takes him out of himself. This is
why the dualism of the mystery religions is wrong—good and evil are radically
different and opposing things, but they are not co-equal.

Evil is
petty, puny, and makes the evildoer smaller and smaller and smaller the more he
gives into it. Good is expansive, and the more a person gives themselves over
to the good, the more they are broken open to that bigger world—ultimately to a
place of transcendence as we are ushered into the communion of the Trinity, the
very interior life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit which Christ makes
possible for us to share in by His mission as man.

This psalm
only gives the slightest allusions to this, only sets the stage for that final
revelation, but to pray it in the fullness of Christian revelation is a
wonderful thing: Lord in your light, we see light itself. And that light is the
light shining from Calvary, from the empty tomb, from the Upper Room, and from
the altar of God and tabernacle of God in every church.

So let’s choose to do
what is good today, as best we can (the whole point of the moral law being given to us in Scripture and Tradition is so we don't have to flounder around in this matter), and in that know we are being borne into a
world and a life beyond what we can imagine.